The Southwest Airlines Way

by Jody Hoffer Gittell

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Editorial Reviews
Product Description

"If you look at Southwest Airlines, and I admire what they do, they've been the most successful airline in the industry."

--Gerard Arpey, CEO, American Airlines

"Through extensive research Jody Hoffer Gittell gets to the bottom of what has sustained Southwest Airlines' positive employee relations and high performance through good and bad times."

--Thomas A. Kochan, professor, MIT Sloan School of Management, MIT Global Airline Industry Program

In an industry with losses in the billions, Southwest Airlines has an unbroken string of 31 consecutive years of profitability. The Southwest Airlines Way examines how the company uses high-performance relationships to create enormous competitive advantage in motivation, teamwork, and coordination among employees. It then goes further to show how any company can foster these powerful cooperative relationships and explains how to:

Lead with credibility and caring
Invest in frontline leaders
Hire and train for relational competence
Use conflicts to build relationships
Make unions its partners, not its adversaries
Build relationships with its suppliers

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

5 out of 5 stars

I'd love to review this book, 2008-07-06
But....seeing as I haven't received it yet, and there doesn't seem to be anywhere on your website for me to complain that I haven't received my book, I'm afraid Amazon's readers are just going to have guess what I think about it....as am I.

Anyone at Amazon reading this, I'd appreciate you letting me know how I can find out what's happened to my book. It's no fun not getting what you paid for in advance, and then not being able to tell anyone about your problem.

How's that for a review?

Have a nice day :-)

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4 out of 5 stars

Useful for IO Psyc class, 2007-09-22
Got the book for my Industrial Organizational Psychology class. It's a pretty interesting read. I recommend it to anyone looking to study IO Psyc.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3 out of 5 stars

Over The Top View of Supposed Perfection, 2007-04-27
I got about halfway through this book and couldn't stand the back slapping tummy rubbing view of perfection portrayed by the author. I lent the book to a colleague who has worked at Southwest and they agreed. Perhaps if you hadn't worked in the game it would be a better book. problem is Southwest probably deserves a better book because they are a great success story - just don't have an author crow so hard about it and detract from the true story. I rate the book three stars (possible generous) simply because I couldn't bear to read it all. For the money I recommend 'Hard Landing' by Petzinger as far more worthwhile ('From Worst to First' is also better).

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3 out of 5 stars

A little heavy on the chest beating, 2007-01-30
The first part of the Audio CD was a turn-off. The title begins by trumpeting the virtues of Southwest. Not only was that not necessary, it gets old very quickly. Once that is over, the discussion is quite a bit more interesting. The philosophy that Southwest operates under is presented in a "top ten list" format. In addition, the author discusses how each of the ten items is necessary for the formula to work, and thus why many companies have failed to improve when trying to use only some of Southwest's techniques.

I would recommend this title only after reading other business titles. Two in particular are "From Good to Great" by Jim Collins and "First, Break all the Rules" / "Now, Discover your Strengths" by Marcus Buckingham. I feel this book doesn't stand well by itself; rather it is a case study of these two works, and probably a few others I haven't read yet.

I recommend the former because Jim Collins notes long term successful businesses all figure out their key performance metric and subordinate all business processes to it. The first part of "The Southwest Airlines Way" speaks right to this point. Aircraft turn around is Southwest Airline's key metric, they do it better than their competitors, and all of the 10 points support minimizing the metric.

The latter references by Buckingham theorize that people's talents are fixed, not learned. Thus, Buckingham recommends hire for the talents you need, as it is a waste of resources to try and train the untalented. This goes hand-in-hand with Southwest Airlines interviewing for, and only accepting, applicants with natural aptitude in people skills. Southwest Airlines ten points to success follow many of Buckingham's observations (recommendations) on how to successfully manage employee talent.

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

5 out of 5 stars

The Southwest Airlines Way, 2006-11-10
This is a great book on the study of Organizational Behavior. It provides great examples and keys elements to running a successful company. As a college student, this book has been invaluable as a source of information for various classes. I highly recommend this book to any student of Human Resource Management or Organizational Behavior.

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